Weight distributions of American domestic passenger air transportation networks

Abstract

Abstract The scale-free features widely concerned by previous weighted network models seemed to not be the best choice to describe the link weight distributions of passenger air transportation networks. In this paper, by introducing an exponent α to the weight evolution rule of the earliest weighted model, and considering the spatial constraints of two-dimensional distances on linking probability, we have conducted rigorous analyses leading to the exponentially truncated power-law distribution for weights: P ( w ) = A ⋅ w − α ⋅ e − B w 1 − α , where A and B are parameters, α  <  1. The theoretical expression is consistent with the empirical results of the American domestic passenger flight records from 1995 to 2020. The model would be applicable to different air transportation systems and to problems in other fields.